You can always find the lie, he said, especially in cross-examination.
When I looked up it was dark outside. I had dozed off. Someone was knocking on my door.
I opened it.
Kimberly Pincus stood there, lit by moonlight and holding a bottle of wine. “Busy?” she said.
81
“IT’S NOT EXACTLY the Ritz,” I said. “But I call it home.”
Kimberly sat at the kitchenette table and started opening the wine with the corkscrew she’d brought. “Quaint,” she said.
“I’ve designed it in early Desi Arnaz. How did you find me?”
“Darling, this is Kimberly.” She pulled the cork. “Have you got wineglasses?”
“Sure.” I snagged two white foam cups from the package on an open shelf. “Don’t drop them.”
She poured white wine in the cups and we thudded them, then sipped.
“You like it?” she said.
“Crisp, light. Jocular without being flippant.”
She laughed. “Wine snob.”
“I meant you.”
She shook her head, and we sipped again. Her smile was easy and warm.
“I’m glad you came by,” I said.
“I’m glad you’re glad. I want to ask you something.”
“I’m a captive audience. There’s no back door.”
“I’m thinking of leaving the city attorney’s office.”
“So soon?”
“It’s been four years,” she said. “I want to open my own office.”
“That’s a tough go, solo,” I said. “Unless you have overhead like mine.” I waved my hand around the trailer.
“Who said anything about solo?” she said. “I want a partner. Somebody who is a knock-down great trial lawyer, and also tall and handsome. Know anybody like that?”
I looked into her jade lamps, and saw she was serious. “You and me, partners?”
“What I said.” She put her cup on the table and folded her hands. “I’ve been working it out in my head. Both of us can try cases like bats out of hell—”
“Around here we say avenging angels.”
“Either way, that’s what we do. That’s what we live for, in fact. It’s one of those things you know you were born for. So we start a little boutique firm, and all we do is trial. We’re not litigators. We don’t sit around conference rooms and jaw. We go to court. We aren’t corporate or criminal lawyers. We are trial lawyers, period. And that’s why we start at seven-fifty an hour. Am I making sense?”
“Wow.” I sat back and saw the whole picture unfold. A true power couple practicing law together, going to court, handling the highest profiles. Kimberly Pincus and Ty Buchanan. It would be a killer combination, that’s for sure. Maybe it really was the time for my trailer days to come to an end. All parties, sacred and profane, could return to normal. Sister Hildegarde would cheer.
“You’ll consider the offer?” Kimberly said.
“I’m stunned.”
“Remember, things move fast in L.A. Think what we could do if both of us had a foot on the accelerator.”
“I will think about it, Kimberly. After the trial. I need to stay focused. But after the trial, I will definitely think about it.”
“Will you be conversational without being verbose?”
“I promise.”
“Deal,” she said. She lifted her cup and offered it as a toast. Before we thudded someone knocked on the door.
“I’m Mr. Popular all of a sudden,” I said. I went to the door, opened it.
Sister Hildegarde said, “Can you please step outside for a moment?”
82
“YOU MAY NOT entertain guests, especially of the opposite sex,” Sister Hildegarde said after I half-closed the door behind me.
I said, “You have a security camera or something?”
“A woman with long hair and a bottle of wine is hard to miss in a place like this.”
“She’s a colleague,” I said.
“She’s going to have to leave.”
“After the wine and a few hours of making out, okay?”
In the moonlight I could see Sister Hildegarde’s face get all Lon Chaney, Jr. on me.
“Kidding,” I said. “I will escort the young lady off the grounds.”
“See that you do,” she said. “Immediately.”
I went back inside. “I guess I have to—”
“I heard,” she said, standing. “I can see myself out. You stay and have more wine, and dream about big-time trials. And anything else you care to dream about.”
I put my arm around her waist and gave her one kiss, but one that counted. One that would last me through a trial.
83
THE NEXT MORNING I went down to the Sip. Pick fixed me up his Expresso Espresso, which he says fosters free speech. He sat at my table and lit his pipe. “Hats are the answer,” he said.
“What’s the question?” I said.
“Why is society hacking and wheezing in an agony of slow death? Hats! If people wore hats, we’d